Anthony Scaramucci in Jerusalem last week. He resigned from an advisory board at his alma mater, Tufts University, after threatening to sue the student newspaper there.CreditAriel Schalit/Associated Press

Anthony Scaramucci, whose brief tenure last summer as White House communications director ended after a profane phone call to a New Yorker reporter, resigned on Tuesday from an advisory board at Tufts University after several weeks of conflict with students.

Mr. Scaramucci said he was stepping down from the advisory board of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to spare Tufts, his alma mater, unnecessary scrutiny. But he stood by his threat to sue The Tufts Daily, a student newspaper, and one of its writers if the writer did not apologize for critical op-eds published this month.

“I thought it would be better for the school and better for me personally if we parted ways,” Mr. Scaramucci said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s a school of law and diplomacy. I thought it was a diplomatic thing to do to bow out.”

Camilo A. Caballero, the graduate student who wrote the op-eds, said Mr. Scaramucci’s resignation was a victory for Tufts students, many of whom had called for the university to dismiss him from the board.

“Today is the day where we see a lot of important pieces come together for this result,” said Mr. Caballero, who will receive his master’s degree from the Fletcher School next month.

More than 250 Tufts students signed a petition this fall that called for Mr. Scaramucci’s dismissal, and the conflict escalated when Mr. Caballero wrote in a Nov. 6 op-ed that Mr. Scaramucci’s presence at the school threatened its credibility. He described Mr. Scaramucci as “an unethical opportunist” whose “career and ideals are diametrically opposed to those ideas and who sullies the vision of the university.”

A week later, in another op-ed, Mr. Caballero criticized the university’s decision to invite Mr. Scaramucci to speak on campus about his background and about the campaign against him. The invitation, he wrote, would “give Scaramucci a platform to legitimize his unethical behavior.”

Mr. Scaramucci was incensed by the description of himself as unethical — which he said was tantamount to calling him a criminal — and by Mr. Caballero’s assertions that he had “sold his soul in contradiction to his own purported beliefs for a seat in the White House” and made his Twitter feed “accessible to friends interested in giving comfort to Holocaust deniers.” (In October, Mr. Scaramucci’s publication shared a poll on Twitter asking how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The options ranged from “less than one million” to “more than five million”; the actual number was six million. The publication, The Scaramucci Post, later apologized.)

On Nov. 21, Mr. Scaramucci threatened a defamation lawsuit unless Mr. Caballero apologized and The Tufts Daily retracted parts of the two op-eds; in response, the university said it was “disappointed” and postponed his speech, which had been scheduled for Monday. On Tuesday, he reiterated his threat.

“Do I still intend to sue?” he said. “Well, that will depend on Mr. Caballero. He has the opportunity to apologize to me for the defamatory comments, and if he does, then there will be no reason to sue him.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts responded to the legal threat on Mr. Caballero’s behalf. In a 10-page letter to Mr. Scaramucci’s lawyer, dated Tuesday, it noted that public figures alleging defamation must prove that the statements in question were false and made with malicious intent, and said Mr. Scaramucci’s claims were “without merit.”

Mr. Caballero, for his part, said the questions raised by Mr. Scaramucci’s threat were about free speech, not partisan beliefs.

“This is an issue about very fundamental human rights,” he said.

Mr. Scaramucci, who attended Harvard Law School after receiving an undergraduate degree from Tufts in 1986, argued that free speech laws did not protect Mr. Caballero’s assertions, and that the campaign against his planned appearance on campus violated free speech more than his own threat to sue did.

Tufts officials, in a statement on Tuesday, said only that they appreciated Mr. Scaramucci’s “past service to Tufts” and wished him well. He had been on the advisory board at Fletcher since last year.

Mr. Caballero said the conflict had exploded in a way he had never expected, or even wanted.

“One day I’m sitting here writing an op-ed about something I’m passionate about, and a few days later we’ve got a whole team trying to defend free speech,” he said. “This was a community discussion that was going on internally, and we wanted to maintain it that way, but how things evolved and the threat to sue created more of a national conversation, unfortunately.”

Mr. Caballero declined to discuss how he would respond if Mr. Scaramucci did sue.